Exporting cheap corn and ruinThe flood of cheap U.S. corn to Mexico since
NAFTA has cut corn prices there by half and washed away 1.3 million
small farmers and that’s just the beginning of the tragedy.

By Michael Pollan
Prairie Writers Circle

Americans have been talking a lot
about trade this campaign season, about globalism's winners and losers,
and especially about the export of American jobs. Yet even when globalism
is working the way it's supposed to -- when Americans are exporting
things like crops rather than jobs -- there can be a steep social
and environmental cost.

One of the ballyhooed successes of the North American Free Trade
Agreement has been the opening of Mexico to American farmers, who
are now selling millions of bushels of corn south of the border.
But why would Mexico, whose people still subsist on maize (mostly
in tortillas), whose farmers still grow more maize than any other
crop, ever buy corn from an American farmer? Because he can produce
it much more cheaply than any Mexican farmer can. Actually that's
not quite right -- it's because he can sell it much more cheaply.

This is largely because of U.S. agricultural policies. While one
part of the U.S. government speaks of the need to alleviate Third
World poverty, another is writing subsidy checks to American farmers,
which encourages them to overproduce and undersell Third World farmers.

The river of cheap American corn began flooding into Mexico after
NAFTA took effect in 1994. Since then, the price of corn in Mexico
has fallen by half. A 2003 report by the Carnegie Endowment says
this flood has washed away 1.3 million small farmers. Unable to
compete, they have left their land to join the swelling pools of
Mexico's urban unemployed. Others migrate to the U.S. to pick our
crops -- former farmers become day laborers.

The cheap U.S. corn has also wreaked havoc on Mexico's land, according
to the Carnegie report. The small farmers forced off their land
often sell out to larger farmers who grow for export, farmers who
must adopt far more industrial (and especially chemical- and water-intensive)
practices to compete in the international marketplace. Fertilizer
runoff into the Sea of Cortez starves its marine life of oxygen,
and Mexico's scarce water resources are leaching north, one tomato
at a time.

Mexico's industrial farmers now produce fruits and vegetables for
American tables year-round. It's absurd for a country like Mexico
-- whose people are often hungry -- to use its best land to grow
produce for a country where food is so abundant that its people
are obese -- but under free trade, it makes economic sense.

Meanwhile, the small farmers struggling to hold on in Mexico are
forced to grow their corn on increasingly marginal lands, contributing
to deforestation and soil erosion.

Compounding these environmental pressures is the advent of something
new to
Mexico: factory farming. The practice of feeding corn to livestock
was actively discouraged by the Mexican government until quite recently
-- an expression of the culture's quasi-religious reverence for
maize. But those policies were reversed in 1994, and, just as it
has done in the United States, cheap corn has driven the growth
of animal feedlots, which contribute to water and air pollution.

Cheap American corn in Mexico threatens Zea mays itself
-- and by extension all of us who have come to depend on this plant.
The small Mexican farmers who grow corn in southern Mexico are responsible
for maintaining the genetic diversity of the species. While American
farmers raise a small handful of genetically nearly identical hybrids,
Mexico's small farmers still grow hundreds of different, open-pollinated
varieties, commonly called landraces.

This genetic diversity, the product of 10,000 years of human-maize
co-evolution, represents some of the most precious and irreplaceable
information on Earth, as we were reminded in 1970 when a fungus
decimated the American corn crop and genes for resistance were found
in a landrace under cultivation in southern Mexico. These landraces
will survive only as long as the farmers who cultivate them do.
The cheap U.S. corn that is driving these farmers off their land
threatens to dry up the pool of genetic diversity on which the future
of the species depends.

Perhaps from a strictly economic point of view, free trade in a
commodity like corn appears eminently rational. But look at the
same phenomenon from a biological point of view and it begins to
look woefully shortsighted, if not mad.

Michael Pollan, a professor at the University
of California-Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, is the
author of three books, including The Botany of Desire. A contributing
writer for the New York Times Magazine, he wrote this essay
for the Land Institute's Prairie Writers Circle, Salina, Kan.
http:www.landinstitute.org/